— 2,183 miles of laughter & tears as I walk the spine of the east coast.

Up way too late …

… waiting for ibuprofen to kick in and struggling with a name for my AT blog.

I’m really looking for a simple, easy to remember name that speaks to what I hope will be a spiritual journey for myself and a method of raising awareness about violence done to women world-wide.

I do not underestimate the tremendous privilege I have to be able to safely undertake such an arduous and expensive challenge. In most parts of the world, if a woman puts everything she needs on her back and walks 2000 miles, it’s to save the lives of herself and her children. Even making the trip would mean risking her life, especially solo.

Look what happened to Jyoti Singh, 23 yo medical student in India, as her and a male companion rode a city bus. I want people to know her name. I want people to know Jyoti Singh was raped and beaten and brutalized with a steel rod until her intestines were pulled out and then she was thrown from the moving bus to lay in the street bleeding. She died 13 days later.

I was raped at the age of 13 by a man twice my age in a backroad gravel pit; not with the brutality that Jyoti Singh underwent but it left scars all the same. Think: I was 13. I was a child.

This is the risk women face at the hands of violent men. We risk being beaten, we risk being raped … merely by virtue of being female.

OK ….. so this post has become more about what male violence can do to women rather than “what do I name my blog?”

But these are my thoughts as the pain in my back subsides (thank you medicine) and I can perhaps finally get to sleep.

There have been so many of us but please let us never forget her name … Jyoti Singh. Let her death not be for naught.